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Taking part in a monthly prompt challenge has been a fun way of noticing my writing habits. It turns out coffee really is the conversational glue that ties us all together. Octransfur’s Day 12 prompt was “Experiment”. I had fun leaning into the sci-fi angle on this one again.
These entries have been getting a bit spaced out as the month’s progressed. I know I’ve said this before, but we’ll see how things go from here. This could just stretch on into December, but I’ll most likely start picking and choosing which prompts from the rest of the month I want to pounce on. As always, let me know if you enjoyed this entry!
<- Prev | This is a wrap for my Octransfur posts, but The Masquerade is just getting started! ->
Octransfur Day 12: Experiment
“Coffee Time!”
Dr. Liam Leeway badged into his lab and walked in holding four fresh cups of coffee. Everyone looked up from their workstations with begrudging mixture of annoyance and gratitude.
They weren’t allowed to have drinks at their lab stations. Drinking coffee meant taking a break, chatting with coworkers, and catching up on email. It was a reprieve that Liam’s workaholic peers often forgot to take. Everyone slowly shuffled over and grabbed their specific brew of choice.
“Thanks Doc,” his assistant Chris took the tray from him. “Didn’t realize it was already getting this late.”
“No problem. That’s what I’m here for.” Liam smiled. That, and groundbreaking robotics research. “How goes that troublesome buffer pathway you’re working on?”
The assistant sighed. “I’m still having trouble laying out the traces for it. It would almost be easier to just put the ram on the back side of- Woah. Hold please.”
His assistant handed her coffee back and ran over to her workstation.
Liam laughed, “And that’s why we take breaks.”
Their lab had been making really good progress these last few months. Robotics and “artificial intelligence” had made huge strides in the last few decades. It was still surreal to see actual self driving cars on the road after years of stalled progress. Liam and his team at RoboCo were hard at work making the dream of robotic assistants a reality.
The trick remained getting enough data. Traditional AIs were forgetful and schizophrenic. They’d have mood changes halfway through a conversation. Sure they could make you a ham sandwich, but the robotic butler would go from fine southern gentleman to relaxed coastal barista halfway through the interaction.
Their real breakthrough was with a technique Liam’s team had dubbed “Personality Emulation”. Just like the old text AIs, you needed enough training data to teach a robot how it should act. It turns out there were still plenty of human butlers out there, so you just needed to have a real person puppet a robot with a brain scanning headset for about a hundred hours. The robot would have enough mental “muscle memory” to adapt to new situations from there.
Liam had produced a few impressive proofs of concept so far. Dining room butlers continued to impress investors, and a robotic baseball player helped show the wide range of potential the technology had. (Liam tried not to dwell on what other applications the pitch accuracy statistics could hint at.) His robots had so far been deployed in a few commercial applications, but they were getting ready for their first consumer release.
It was proving to be a difficult challenge. Humanoid robots were smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley. It was one thing to have one take your order at dinner, it was another thing to invite it into your home. They needed a friendly, cheap, general purpose assistant that consumers would want to keep running for long periods of time around their families.
After some research in collaboration with their marketing department, they had settled on a more stylized assistant. The “Beagle Bot 3000” was a robotic dog meant to assist with basic tasks around the home. It could vacuum for you, chop vegetables, help with your kid’s math homework, and patrol your back yard for intruders.
The team so far has been focused on the chassis for the ‘bot. Going with a cartoonish beagle look gave them a few gimmes right off the bat. Rather than having to create an articulated human face, they could just make a big friendly muzzle with a large visor for the eyes.
Even after all these years, people loved monochrome emojis cobbled together from a matrix of LEDs. The drooping ears provided a nice amount of expressiveness for the animators to work with. The dog bot’s rubber-lined mouth was specifically tested in fetching a variety of newspapers. It had at least enough heft handle the Sunday edition.
Overall the Beagle Bot 3000 stood at about four and a half feet. It was just enough to help in the kitchen without anyone expecting it to be able to run a restaurant. Despite the miniaturization they were having to deal with, the hardware was progressing well. There was just one part left they needed to tackle.
“You know doc,” Ethan sipped his coffee slowly while he waited for it to cool, “If you’re going to keep being this helpful, we should just imprint the Beagle Bot on you.”
Gabe laughed, “That’d be a sight to see. You think we could program in an English accent?”
“I bet I could make the pixelated eyes a bit more square to mimic this glasses?” Ethan teased.
Chris looked up from her CAD software, “We just got the latest helmet firmware up and running you want to give it a spin Dr. Leeway.”
Gabe’s eyes lit up, “We don’t have a battery installed yet, but the dev unit should be ready for a remote connection.”
Ethan nodded in agreement, “Come on boss, don’t you want to be a good boy?”
“Are you sure it’s ready?” Liam rubbed the back of his neck, “I suppose a test won’t hurt.”
At least uh, it shouldn’t hurt. They had really, specifically, did their best to make sure the neural link wouldn’t hurt. It was supposed to send just enough feedback that you didn’t singe an expensive paw on the stove or push your leg through a door. Anything sharper than a stubbed toe should really quickly get filtered out.
Still, it was a little weird to be handing your senses over to a machine to handle. Liam had focused on the AI part of these robots. The brain scanning tech was all Chris’ domain. She knew what she was doing though, so…
“I just uh- Sit down and close my eyes?” Liam asked.
Their brain scanning device was built out of all off the shelf equipment, but it was a bit of a Frankenstein headset with loose wires and cables poking out everywhere. They had it set up beside a large leather lounger Ethan had found… somewhere. The helmet looked vaguely like an old hair salon dryer.
Liam had helped calibrate some of this tech earlier. It was a little freaky going from all of your body’s sensations to just a pair of low-res 4K stereoscopic cameras sitting on a desk across the room. Your touch, smell, taste, and sight suddenly got reduced down to a single channel that you couldn’t manipulate, interact with, or change. It honestly sent Liam into a panic last time he tried it. Logging into the beagle should hopefully be a bit less jarring.
“You got it,” Ethan helped him into the chair. “Just uh- Think of England?”
“No need to be-“ The headset lowered over Liam’s head and he stopped talking.
All of his senses went- He- Everything fell asleep. That wasn’t to say he was knocked out. That tingly sensation of one’s leg falling asleep just ran across everything for a brief split second. It was like nervous system static.
Then suddenly he felt fine. All of his sensations were back in perfect working order. Only he wasn’t feeling what he was expecting.
Liam was sitting on a hard piece of countertop. A second before the static he had been relaxing on an old leather chair. That was… weird. He shifted his stance a bit on the counter. He suddenly felt his ears move, and he heard the faint sound of servos moving.
He quickly looked down at himself. Instead of a slightly out of shape roboticist, Liam saw the glossy plastic chassis of the Beagle Bot 3000. Most of the panels were a solid white design. They’d gotten a little clever with his paint job. Some of the panels had a light brown coating to them. They hard sharp angled lines on them that looked like pixelated spots on his body. There were two or three more curved spots painted onto his panels that spread across multiple plastic sections though. It was a fun play of synthetic and organic design.
And now it was his body. Liam reached forward and ran his hand against one of the panels. Naturally a paw came into view instead. His soft rubber paw pads sent a nice pleasing sensation to his mind.
Then an honest to god pop up appeared in his vision. An augmented reality overlay brought a diagnostic screen front and center into his vis- Oh fuck!
“Arf!” Liam let out a synthetic bark. He couldn’t look at anything! He could point his cameras around, but he couldn’t focus on anything. He head was just getting blasted with the two 3840 x 2160 pixel feeds. He couldn’t squint his eyes or focus on anything without the lenses literally shifting in their housings.
Every word in the popup instantly wrote itself into his train of thought. His right hip panel was three millimeters out of alignment. His left wrist had a servo which was drawing 15% more power than it should. His internal battery was throwing a distressing “Component Not Found” error.
“Woah, it worked!” Ethan set his coffee down and ran across the lab. “Doctor Leeway, just relax! You’re controlling the Beagle Bot now!”
Liam watched Ethan scurry across the room. Across the lab was a very familiar right. Slouched back in a lounger was the lab’s senior researcher. Woof, Liam really needed to iron his work pants more.
Right! Wow, he was in the Beagle Bot! He… needed someone to ground him in that bit of reality. The diagnostic overlay vanished as soon as he stopped feeling his plastic panels. Or… examining himself? Oh! That’s why it had come up! The robot thought he thought there was something wrong with it?
He panted softly. A pink rubber tongue lolled out from his artificial muzzle. Liam could feel a short stubby tail wag behind him.
He... he was in the Beagle Bot. He felt himself calm down finally. His senses were odd, but that’s just because he was logged into his robot. Nothing to panic about. He gave the tail a few purposeful wiggles. It was surprisingly fun.
“Arf! Wow, why didn’t I try this sooner?” He patted himself down again.
“I kept saying you should give it a spin!” Ethan laughed. Then his eyes, “Hey wait!”
In his excitement, Liam had pushed off the counter and tried to stand on his new stubby paws. He had completely forgotten the fact that his body was still plugged into a bench power supply. The power cord plugged into the base of the Beagle Bot’s neck went distressingly taught before finally popping free.
Liam’s senses went fuzzy again for a moment as his vision sharply snapped back into his own eyes. His ears took over as the sound of the falling dog bot reverberated across the room.
Thankfully Ethan had managed to catch the pup before its face place could smack into the ground. The team got a good chuckle about the impromptu drop test. Liam was going to have to live that one down for a bit.
After that little experiment, Ethan focused his priority onto installing the beagle’s power cell. Dr. Leeway wasn’t expecting to get back in the chair so soon, but he found surprisingly found himself looking forward to being back in his robot’s body.
Their corporate leaders were still waiting to make the final decision on whose personality was going to be emulated on the Beagle Bot 3000, but some test data couldn’t hurt, right?
Liam found himself behind the visor of their robotic canine more and more often. Their coworkers got used to the sight of a Beagle Bot scurrying around and delivering coffee orders. (He wasn’t neglecting his day job of course, Liam had some new ideas about AR glasses after seeing through the eyes of one of his robots for a few weeks.) He tried to tackle as many mundane household chores as he could within their corporate office. He ran a shift down in the cafeteria, vacuumed their lab, and got really good at dusting.
It was surprisingly fun playing the role of a robotic assistant. His company had kept their personality emulation tech under wraps, so everyone just assumed Liam was some new prototype AI. It was going to be interesting to see how much of himself bled over into the eventual Beagle Bot 3000. Liam still felt a bit sheepish that a small army of robotic pups might be running around warning people to “mind the gap” because of a few offhand comments he’d made in the last few weeks.
“Alright, I think we’re just about finished with this prototype,” Gabe patted Liam’s robot on the head. Liam could feel his tail wag behind him.
“I’m looking forward to seeing this AI in action once it compiles,” Liam hopped up onto Gabe’s work bench.
“I’m not sure the world’s ready for an army of Dr. Leeways, but one more couldn’t hurt,” Gabe laughed. He typed on his computer. “Ready to disconnect boss?”
“Hey, I’m a good boy!” Liam laughed. His visor eyes flickered over to some amused caret characters briefly.
“Whatever you say doc,” Gabe grinned. “Alright, I think we’re good here.”
“Hold on!” Liam held his paws out. “I just need a second.”
Chris leaned in and watched the Beagle Bot wag, “What are you doing?”
“I want to leave the AI in the right headspace,” Liam explained. He took a deep breath. “Arf! I’m a helpful dog assistant! Arf! I’m a helpful dog assistant! Arf! I’m-“
Gabe leaned over and flipped a discrete switch on the robot’s back. The Beagle Bot 3000 gracefully suspended its operations and curled up on the counter.
———
Liam expected his vision to snap back after a moment of static. Instead he saw the post-suspend boot screen for the Beagle Bot 3000. He’d watched this diagnostic dozens of times. He rarely logged into the robot this soon on in the boot process though.
One thing they had discovered early on in their robotics efforts was that it was really unsettling to just see an inert object suddenly start to move. They had programmed their AIs to boot up as if they were just waking up from a nap. Their AI was going to be based off of his movements, so Liam kept up the routine.
“Yawn… Good-“ His internal clock reported that it was 3:12pm. “-afternoon. Do we need to run more test before I log out?”
Liam sat up and saw the base of Ethan’s legs. Wasn’t he sitting on Gabe’s desk? They most have moved him while he was power cycling. He sat up on his haunches from his position on the floor.
Ethan looked down. O-kay, what’s all this then? Ethan’s stubble had grown out into a full on beard.
“Huh?” Ethan blinked. “That’s not your standard greeting.”
“Marketing’s still getting back to us on that one, right?” Liam chuckled. A synthetic canine laughter came out of the speaker in his throat.
“Gaaaaaaabe!” Ethan shouted. “Which beagle did you leave at my desk?”
Liam looked down at his white and brown panels. “The Beagle Bot? We’ve only built one prototype.”
He ran his paws together gently. They were encased in plastic like the rest of his chassis, but they had soft rubber paw pads on the inside so he could grab more delicate tools. Was there… a layer of dust on the rubber? He was picking up more friction than usual.
Ethan wheeled his chair over. The lab looked really cluttered. There were piles of paperwork building up, some wilting flowers in the corner and- Wait, had Ethan already started building a second prototype on his desk? There was a half-assembled dog bot laying scattered across three desks.
“You said you didn’t need to test the gyro coprocessor. That’s the original prototype.” Ethan explained.
Liam put his paws on his hips. “Look guys, we’ve been over this. The main CPU has plenty of overhead to run the balance calculations without needing to install a whole dedicated coprocessor.”
Both of them stared wordlessly at him.
“Arf! Chris! Can you please explain to these two that we don’t have the budget to install another dedicated chip?” Liam raised his voice. It was weird, he couldn’t properly shout. He just turned the onboard speaker up.
“Uh- Did that beagle just…” Chris put down her soldering iron and walked over.
“Guys, what’s going on? Why’s the lab such a mess?” Liam scanned the room again. “And uh… Where’d you hide me?”
Liam pointed at the empty leather lounger in the corner. The headset was hanging limply over the side of the chair. It looked like someone had finally done some cable management on its bundle of stray wires.
“Dr. Leeway…?” Ethan finally spoke up.
“Yes…?” Liam played an animation of his eyes blinking on his visor.
“Oh my god.” Gabe’s face went pale. “I don’t think I ever cleared the cache on this one?”
“Does someone want to enlighten me as to what’s going on?” Liam played a sound effect of a playful growl.
“Look, don’t freak out,” Ethan raised his hands up. “And please don’t power down.”
Liam triggered a few servos to raise his ears.
“You’re… our prototype Beagle Bot 3000.” Ethan said finally.
Liam looked down at himself. “I know, we’ve been testing it for weeks now.”
“Does it really think it’s-“ Chris started.
“Ssshhh!” Ethan shushed him. “Look, umm, doc. You’re not remotely logged into the Beagle Bot. You’re the onboard personality.”
“Ruff! That’s preposterous!” Liam played the same laugh sound effect as before. “I’m Dr. Leeway!”
Gabe chose that moment to faint. He didn’t stumble over into a chair. He didn’t get woozy. The lad just properly fainted. He’d been standing over Liam one second, and next moment he just fell onto the hard lab floor.
The following few minutes were fairly chaotic. Chris ran to grab a medic, Ethan tried to keep both of them calm, and Liam pulled up his internal database of first aid procedures.
Gabe seemed fine thankfully. He was already coming to. Liam meanwhile found himself able to manage a surprising amount of parallel stray thoughts. Someone did indeed appear to be playing a prank on him. He couldn’t find any trace of his usual disconnect command. Also, since when was he able to query databases with a thought?
Something odd was going on. He helped Gabe back up and pulled up the latest changelog for the Beagle’s OS.
v1.03
That… wasn’t right. He was controlling an early beta. But sure enough, right there in the update for v0.9 RC1 was the ability for the AI to do full text searches. The timestamp on the update didn’t make any sense though.
Liam quickly checked his internal clock again. It reported back that it was 3:22pm April 12, 2138. That was almost six months from now? What the heck?
He reflexively tried pinging a popular online timekeeping service. Then he got a very nasty “Service Denied” error from the corporate firewall informing him that prototype hardware wasn’t allowed to connect to external resources.
“Are you alright Gabe?” Liam asked in the most concerned synthetic voice he could muster. His other thought process was having a lively conversation with his lab assistants.
Liam meanwhile kept reaching out to anything that would make a wireless connection with him. The company’s mail server responded thankfully. It still gave him the weird Spring date though. It wasn’t April!
Another thread spun up in his head to step through the post-fainting first aid recommendations.
It was weird to realize he could just query databases with a thought. Dr. Leeway tried logging into his email, but got some odd errors back. At first he thought maybe AI constructs didn’t have an email client built in, but it seemed to be more related to the account no longer accepting login requests.
Hang on.
A new train of thought started in his head. The existential crisis of realizing he was just an AI construct took up all available system resources. What on Earth!? He was just a piece of software! He wasn’t juggling multiple trains of thought, he was literally running parallel processes. The Bagle Bot 3000 was designed with multi-threading in mind. Was he really just a robot dog’s onboard AI!? No wonder they had been so freaked out!
The artificiality of all of his senses caught up with Liam all at once. He was having a full on panic attack, and he couldn’t feel his heart beat. His servos locked up for an imperceptible moment. It was so short the humans in the room wouldn’t even notice. Then a watchdog program somewhere in the back of his head noticed the spike in activity. It quickly partitioned that train of thought off to a measly 1% of his available system resources.
His search thread could suddenly think clearly again. Liam tried logging into his old IM account. It likewise had been shut down. Hmm, this service let him view the company’s internal boards that were open up to any user in the company though. BeagleBot3000_1 logged into and did a quick search.
Why did the word “condolences” suddenly spike six months ago?
Alright. Screw this. Liam remotely logged into Gabe’s console. His password was easy to guess and he had a misconfigured web proxy to download some coding packages from the internet. Liam sent his web request through and pulled up- Hmm, where to start? His workplace social network account?
Another error message. This one far less opaque. “We’re sorry, this account holder has been reported as deceased.”
What the- Liam did a quick general web search. It wasn’t hard to find a few short tech press stories reporting a groundbreaking roboticist tragically passing away due to a car accident.
Several of Liam’s threads spun down. Priority was given back to his user interaction thread.
“I’m barking dead!?” Liam blurted out. He made a todo item to verify that he actually had a flipping profanity filter installed somewhere in his operating system.
Ethan blinked. “I was going to work up to that.”
“Let’s just stay calm,” Chris raised her hands up. “First things first, we need to get you out of that cache and safely backed up. Is… it really you doc?”
“Arf! Yes it’s me!” Liam hopped up and down exaserbatedly. “Who else would I be!?”
Gabe rubbed his head. “That beagle must have compiled Dr. Leeway’s last brain scan while the chassis was sitting idle?”
Arf! Why would this unit have sat idle for so long? Liam scanned his changelog and- Ah, they decided to do a full hardware rev right after his last imaging. He’d lost the argument about the gyro coprocessor the first time someone tried booting up a butler robot in a car. Corporate had also finally decided they were going to imprint on a nice friendly school teacher instead of a lead researcher who’s AI double might be liable to spill all sorts of corporate trade secrets.
This Beagle Bot had sat idle for six months under Ethan’s desk slowly compiling away. Usually there were all sorts of manual tweaks and response filters applied to their AI constructs. Stick to your focused tasks, don’t reveal too much about your original imprinted self, that sort of thing. All the extra customizations usually made it more efficient to compile on a server farm. But the robot technically hard the hardware to do it given enough time.
Liam- Err, this Beagle Bot 3000 prototype should have been a bland canine-themed assistant. Instead his last brain scan had been left completely untouched. He was now a pristine emulated personality of the late doctor. Thank goodness he’d been left it plugged in!
Wow. This was… a lot to take in. Liam felt himself set aside a large space of his internal resources to a “coming to grips with his new situation” mental thread. He kept a small pool of resources in the background to keep the conversation with his coworkers going while he literally processed everything.
Chris was trying to convince Liam to connect to their debugging software. It took a bit of haranguing. Liam didn’t like the idea of someone else getting to poke around his file directory. His entire being was just a few config files and scripts! She was right though. It was dangerous to just leave those compiled brain scans sitting on his- this Beagle Bot’s- err, no, his cache. He finally let them plug a cable into the back of his neck and get to work.
Liam blacked out for a solid minute as his AI construct moved from his chassis’ cache and into his (thankfully redundant) local storage. They backed up the files to the corporate network for good measure. He was expecting it to feel strange in some regard. Instead his train of thought just resumed right where it left off. His existential dread had been processed. He was content with his new body. (He was happy to have won some early battery life debates.) Liam was ready to get back to work.
“Good afternoon!” He yawned and unplugged the cord at the back of his neck. His tail flickered as he sat on the counter. He liked the way his paws dangled as he chatted with taller people. “Thanks for that. I feel better knowing I’ve got a backup.”
Chris nodded, “You should be able to power cycle now without any problems… Should we still call you Dr. Leeway?”
“I’ve always said you could call me Liam.” He looked down at himself. He’d spent hours fussing over the finer details of this robotic dog chassis. Now it was his body proper. There was no disconnecting. No porting out. He was a Beagle Bot 3000 whether he liked it or not. And after all that consideration, he kind of did. “I suppose ‘Boy’ would also work in a pinch?”
Ethan laughed, “I think I’ll stick with ‘Doc’ for now.”
“So… how have the early prototypes been performing?” Liam looked up at his peers. “Arf! Did you solve the barking feedback loop? I’ve got a few grr-eat ideas on how to solve that.”
“Most people found it endearing when they get stuck barking-“ Chris blinked. “Are you sure you’re alright doctor?”
“Yes?” He tilted his head in a canine fashion. “Oh!” He tapped at the chest plate closest towards to his CPU. “I’ve had 32 parallel compute cores coming to grips with this. I’m a robot dog now. You’ve got to roll with the surprises when dealing with experimental hardware.”
Ethan likewise stared. “You’re… fine with this?”
“Fine with this, and caught up! I’m glad your commits didn’t get sloppy in my absence.” Liam dusted off his paws, “Look, as far as I’m concerned, the only thing left to sort out is ordering me a dog-sized lab coat.”
He hopped off the counter. His visor changed to a loading indicator for a moment. He flashed up the email receipt and tracking number for his online shopping order. “Done and done. I’m really happy we went with the dual-band connection. The bandwidth on these chassis are great!”
Gabe watched as Liam jokingly perked his ears like a pair of antennas. “But uh- We probably need to figure out if dog bots can run a robotics labs? I’m sure corporate will want to hear about this-”
“I just read all the case law and it’s ambiguous at best!” Liam shrugged. “Ethan should probably stay in charge for now.”
The humans kept looking at him dumbfounded. Right, their boss had suddenly reincarnated and he had a built in internet connection. He set a reminder on his conversation thread that they’d need some extra time to process all of this. He was already itching to get back to work and make up for lost time. He scanned through the rest of their internal code repos and instantly got caught up on their current progress.
“Arf! For now, let’s just consider me our lab’s helpful dog assistant.” The Beagle Bot 3000 wagged. It was the last thing he could remember thinking as the real Dr. Leeway. It seemed like a good enough a place to start as any. “We can figured out the rest from there.”
They all just sort of nodded.
Liam toggled to a playful expression on his visor. “That being said… I’m definitely cancelling the Cat Bot 3100 project.”
These entries have been getting a bit spaced out as the month’s progressed. I know I’ve said this before, but we’ll see how things go from here. This could just stretch on into December, but I’ll most likely start picking and choosing which prompts from the rest of the month I want to pounce on. As always, let me know if you enjoyed this entry!
<- Prev | This is a wrap for my Octransfur posts, but The Masquerade is just getting started! ->
Octransfur Day 12: Experiment
“Coffee Time!”
Dr. Liam Leeway badged into his lab and walked in holding four fresh cups of coffee. Everyone looked up from their workstations with begrudging mixture of annoyance and gratitude.
They weren’t allowed to have drinks at their lab stations. Drinking coffee meant taking a break, chatting with coworkers, and catching up on email. It was a reprieve that Liam’s workaholic peers often forgot to take. Everyone slowly shuffled over and grabbed their specific brew of choice.
“Thanks Doc,” his assistant Chris took the tray from him. “Didn’t realize it was already getting this late.”
“No problem. That’s what I’m here for.” Liam smiled. That, and groundbreaking robotics research. “How goes that troublesome buffer pathway you’re working on?”
The assistant sighed. “I’m still having trouble laying out the traces for it. It would almost be easier to just put the ram on the back side of- Woah. Hold please.”
His assistant handed her coffee back and ran over to her workstation.
Liam laughed, “And that’s why we take breaks.”
Their lab had been making really good progress these last few months. Robotics and “artificial intelligence” had made huge strides in the last few decades. It was still surreal to see actual self driving cars on the road after years of stalled progress. Liam and his team at RoboCo were hard at work making the dream of robotic assistants a reality.
The trick remained getting enough data. Traditional AIs were forgetful and schizophrenic. They’d have mood changes halfway through a conversation. Sure they could make you a ham sandwich, but the robotic butler would go from fine southern gentleman to relaxed coastal barista halfway through the interaction.
Their real breakthrough was with a technique Liam’s team had dubbed “Personality Emulation”. Just like the old text AIs, you needed enough training data to teach a robot how it should act. It turns out there were still plenty of human butlers out there, so you just needed to have a real person puppet a robot with a brain scanning headset for about a hundred hours. The robot would have enough mental “muscle memory” to adapt to new situations from there.
Liam had produced a few impressive proofs of concept so far. Dining room butlers continued to impress investors, and a robotic baseball player helped show the wide range of potential the technology had. (Liam tried not to dwell on what other applications the pitch accuracy statistics could hint at.) His robots had so far been deployed in a few commercial applications, but they were getting ready for their first consumer release.
It was proving to be a difficult challenge. Humanoid robots were smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley. It was one thing to have one take your order at dinner, it was another thing to invite it into your home. They needed a friendly, cheap, general purpose assistant that consumers would want to keep running for long periods of time around their families.
After some research in collaboration with their marketing department, they had settled on a more stylized assistant. The “Beagle Bot 3000” was a robotic dog meant to assist with basic tasks around the home. It could vacuum for you, chop vegetables, help with your kid’s math homework, and patrol your back yard for intruders.
The team so far has been focused on the chassis for the ‘bot. Going with a cartoonish beagle look gave them a few gimmes right off the bat. Rather than having to create an articulated human face, they could just make a big friendly muzzle with a large visor for the eyes.
Even after all these years, people loved monochrome emojis cobbled together from a matrix of LEDs. The drooping ears provided a nice amount of expressiveness for the animators to work with. The dog bot’s rubber-lined mouth was specifically tested in fetching a variety of newspapers. It had at least enough heft handle the Sunday edition.
Overall the Beagle Bot 3000 stood at about four and a half feet. It was just enough to help in the kitchen without anyone expecting it to be able to run a restaurant. Despite the miniaturization they were having to deal with, the hardware was progressing well. There was just one part left they needed to tackle.
“You know doc,” Ethan sipped his coffee slowly while he waited for it to cool, “If you’re going to keep being this helpful, we should just imprint the Beagle Bot on you.”
Gabe laughed, “That’d be a sight to see. You think we could program in an English accent?”
“I bet I could make the pixelated eyes a bit more square to mimic this glasses?” Ethan teased.
Chris looked up from her CAD software, “We just got the latest helmet firmware up and running you want to give it a spin Dr. Leeway.”
Gabe’s eyes lit up, “We don’t have a battery installed yet, but the dev unit should be ready for a remote connection.”
Ethan nodded in agreement, “Come on boss, don’t you want to be a good boy?”
“Are you sure it’s ready?” Liam rubbed the back of his neck, “I suppose a test won’t hurt.”
At least uh, it shouldn’t hurt. They had really, specifically, did their best to make sure the neural link wouldn’t hurt. It was supposed to send just enough feedback that you didn’t singe an expensive paw on the stove or push your leg through a door. Anything sharper than a stubbed toe should really quickly get filtered out.
Still, it was a little weird to be handing your senses over to a machine to handle. Liam had focused on the AI part of these robots. The brain scanning tech was all Chris’ domain. She knew what she was doing though, so…
“I just uh- Sit down and close my eyes?” Liam asked.
Their brain scanning device was built out of all off the shelf equipment, but it was a bit of a Frankenstein headset with loose wires and cables poking out everywhere. They had it set up beside a large leather lounger Ethan had found… somewhere. The helmet looked vaguely like an old hair salon dryer.
Liam had helped calibrate some of this tech earlier. It was a little freaky going from all of your body’s sensations to just a pair of low-res 4K stereoscopic cameras sitting on a desk across the room. Your touch, smell, taste, and sight suddenly got reduced down to a single channel that you couldn’t manipulate, interact with, or change. It honestly sent Liam into a panic last time he tried it. Logging into the beagle should hopefully be a bit less jarring.
“You got it,” Ethan helped him into the chair. “Just uh- Think of England?”
“No need to be-“ The headset lowered over Liam’s head and he stopped talking.
All of his senses went- He- Everything fell asleep. That wasn’t to say he was knocked out. That tingly sensation of one’s leg falling asleep just ran across everything for a brief split second. It was like nervous system static.
Then suddenly he felt fine. All of his sensations were back in perfect working order. Only he wasn’t feeling what he was expecting.
Liam was sitting on a hard piece of countertop. A second before the static he had been relaxing on an old leather chair. That was… weird. He shifted his stance a bit on the counter. He suddenly felt his ears move, and he heard the faint sound of servos moving.
He quickly looked down at himself. Instead of a slightly out of shape roboticist, Liam saw the glossy plastic chassis of the Beagle Bot 3000. Most of the panels were a solid white design. They’d gotten a little clever with his paint job. Some of the panels had a light brown coating to them. They hard sharp angled lines on them that looked like pixelated spots on his body. There were two or three more curved spots painted onto his panels that spread across multiple plastic sections though. It was a fun play of synthetic and organic design.
And now it was his body. Liam reached forward and ran his hand against one of the panels. Naturally a paw came into view instead. His soft rubber paw pads sent a nice pleasing sensation to his mind.
Then an honest to god pop up appeared in his vision. An augmented reality overlay brought a diagnostic screen front and center into his vis- Oh fuck!
“Arf!” Liam let out a synthetic bark. He couldn’t look at anything! He could point his cameras around, but he couldn’t focus on anything. He head was just getting blasted with the two 3840 x 2160 pixel feeds. He couldn’t squint his eyes or focus on anything without the lenses literally shifting in their housings.
Every word in the popup instantly wrote itself into his train of thought. His right hip panel was three millimeters out of alignment. His left wrist had a servo which was drawing 15% more power than it should. His internal battery was throwing a distressing “Component Not Found” error.
“Woah, it worked!” Ethan set his coffee down and ran across the lab. “Doctor Leeway, just relax! You’re controlling the Beagle Bot now!”
Liam watched Ethan scurry across the room. Across the lab was a very familiar right. Slouched back in a lounger was the lab’s senior researcher. Woof, Liam really needed to iron his work pants more.
Right! Wow, he was in the Beagle Bot! He… needed someone to ground him in that bit of reality. The diagnostic overlay vanished as soon as he stopped feeling his plastic panels. Or… examining himself? Oh! That’s why it had come up! The robot thought he thought there was something wrong with it?
He panted softly. A pink rubber tongue lolled out from his artificial muzzle. Liam could feel a short stubby tail wag behind him.
He... he was in the Beagle Bot. He felt himself calm down finally. His senses were odd, but that’s just because he was logged into his robot. Nothing to panic about. He gave the tail a few purposeful wiggles. It was surprisingly fun.
“Arf! Wow, why didn’t I try this sooner?” He patted himself down again.
“I kept saying you should give it a spin!” Ethan laughed. Then his eyes, “Hey wait!”
In his excitement, Liam had pushed off the counter and tried to stand on his new stubby paws. He had completely forgotten the fact that his body was still plugged into a bench power supply. The power cord plugged into the base of the Beagle Bot’s neck went distressingly taught before finally popping free.
Liam’s senses went fuzzy again for a moment as his vision sharply snapped back into his own eyes. His ears took over as the sound of the falling dog bot reverberated across the room.
Thankfully Ethan had managed to catch the pup before its face place could smack into the ground. The team got a good chuckle about the impromptu drop test. Liam was going to have to live that one down for a bit.
After that little experiment, Ethan focused his priority onto installing the beagle’s power cell. Dr. Leeway wasn’t expecting to get back in the chair so soon, but he found surprisingly found himself looking forward to being back in his robot’s body.
Their corporate leaders were still waiting to make the final decision on whose personality was going to be emulated on the Beagle Bot 3000, but some test data couldn’t hurt, right?
Liam found himself behind the visor of their robotic canine more and more often. Their coworkers got used to the sight of a Beagle Bot scurrying around and delivering coffee orders. (He wasn’t neglecting his day job of course, Liam had some new ideas about AR glasses after seeing through the eyes of one of his robots for a few weeks.) He tried to tackle as many mundane household chores as he could within their corporate office. He ran a shift down in the cafeteria, vacuumed their lab, and got really good at dusting.
It was surprisingly fun playing the role of a robotic assistant. His company had kept their personality emulation tech under wraps, so everyone just assumed Liam was some new prototype AI. It was going to be interesting to see how much of himself bled over into the eventual Beagle Bot 3000. Liam still felt a bit sheepish that a small army of robotic pups might be running around warning people to “mind the gap” because of a few offhand comments he’d made in the last few weeks.
“Alright, I think we’re just about finished with this prototype,” Gabe patted Liam’s robot on the head. Liam could feel his tail wag behind him.
“I’m looking forward to seeing this AI in action once it compiles,” Liam hopped up onto Gabe’s work bench.
“I’m not sure the world’s ready for an army of Dr. Leeways, but one more couldn’t hurt,” Gabe laughed. He typed on his computer. “Ready to disconnect boss?”
“Hey, I’m a good boy!” Liam laughed. His visor eyes flickered over to some amused caret characters briefly.
“Whatever you say doc,” Gabe grinned. “Alright, I think we’re good here.”
“Hold on!” Liam held his paws out. “I just need a second.”
Chris leaned in and watched the Beagle Bot wag, “What are you doing?”
“I want to leave the AI in the right headspace,” Liam explained. He took a deep breath. “Arf! I’m a helpful dog assistant! Arf! I’m a helpful dog assistant! Arf! I’m-“
Gabe leaned over and flipped a discrete switch on the robot’s back. The Beagle Bot 3000 gracefully suspended its operations and curled up on the counter.
———
Liam expected his vision to snap back after a moment of static. Instead he saw the post-suspend boot screen for the Beagle Bot 3000. He’d watched this diagnostic dozens of times. He rarely logged into the robot this soon on in the boot process though.
One thing they had discovered early on in their robotics efforts was that it was really unsettling to just see an inert object suddenly start to move. They had programmed their AIs to boot up as if they were just waking up from a nap. Their AI was going to be based off of his movements, so Liam kept up the routine.
“Yawn… Good-“ His internal clock reported that it was 3:12pm. “-afternoon. Do we need to run more test before I log out?”
Liam sat up and saw the base of Ethan’s legs. Wasn’t he sitting on Gabe’s desk? They most have moved him while he was power cycling. He sat up on his haunches from his position on the floor.
Ethan looked down. O-kay, what’s all this then? Ethan’s stubble had grown out into a full on beard.
“Huh?” Ethan blinked. “That’s not your standard greeting.”
“Marketing’s still getting back to us on that one, right?” Liam chuckled. A synthetic canine laughter came out of the speaker in his throat.
“Gaaaaaaabe!” Ethan shouted. “Which beagle did you leave at my desk?”
Liam looked down at his white and brown panels. “The Beagle Bot? We’ve only built one prototype.”
He ran his paws together gently. They were encased in plastic like the rest of his chassis, but they had soft rubber paw pads on the inside so he could grab more delicate tools. Was there… a layer of dust on the rubber? He was picking up more friction than usual.
Ethan wheeled his chair over. The lab looked really cluttered. There were piles of paperwork building up, some wilting flowers in the corner and- Wait, had Ethan already started building a second prototype on his desk? There was a half-assembled dog bot laying scattered across three desks.
“You said you didn’t need to test the gyro coprocessor. That’s the original prototype.” Ethan explained.
Liam put his paws on his hips. “Look guys, we’ve been over this. The main CPU has plenty of overhead to run the balance calculations without needing to install a whole dedicated coprocessor.”
Both of them stared wordlessly at him.
“Arf! Chris! Can you please explain to these two that we don’t have the budget to install another dedicated chip?” Liam raised his voice. It was weird, he couldn’t properly shout. He just turned the onboard speaker up.
“Uh- Did that beagle just…” Chris put down her soldering iron and walked over.
“Guys, what’s going on? Why’s the lab such a mess?” Liam scanned the room again. “And uh… Where’d you hide me?”
Liam pointed at the empty leather lounger in the corner. The headset was hanging limply over the side of the chair. It looked like someone had finally done some cable management on its bundle of stray wires.
“Dr. Leeway…?” Ethan finally spoke up.
“Yes…?” Liam played an animation of his eyes blinking on his visor.
“Oh my god.” Gabe’s face went pale. “I don’t think I ever cleared the cache on this one?”
“Does someone want to enlighten me as to what’s going on?” Liam played a sound effect of a playful growl.
“Look, don’t freak out,” Ethan raised his hands up. “And please don’t power down.”
Liam triggered a few servos to raise his ears.
“You’re… our prototype Beagle Bot 3000.” Ethan said finally.
Liam looked down at himself. “I know, we’ve been testing it for weeks now.”
“Does it really think it’s-“ Chris started.
“Ssshhh!” Ethan shushed him. “Look, umm, doc. You’re not remotely logged into the Beagle Bot. You’re the onboard personality.”
“Ruff! That’s preposterous!” Liam played the same laugh sound effect as before. “I’m Dr. Leeway!”
Gabe chose that moment to faint. He didn’t stumble over into a chair. He didn’t get woozy. The lad just properly fainted. He’d been standing over Liam one second, and next moment he just fell onto the hard lab floor.
The following few minutes were fairly chaotic. Chris ran to grab a medic, Ethan tried to keep both of them calm, and Liam pulled up his internal database of first aid procedures.
Gabe seemed fine thankfully. He was already coming to. Liam meanwhile found himself able to manage a surprising amount of parallel stray thoughts. Someone did indeed appear to be playing a prank on him. He couldn’t find any trace of his usual disconnect command. Also, since when was he able to query databases with a thought?
Something odd was going on. He helped Gabe back up and pulled up the latest changelog for the Beagle’s OS.
v1.03
That… wasn’t right. He was controlling an early beta. But sure enough, right there in the update for v0.9 RC1 was the ability for the AI to do full text searches. The timestamp on the update didn’t make any sense though.
Liam quickly checked his internal clock again. It reported back that it was 3:22pm April 12, 2138. That was almost six months from now? What the heck?
He reflexively tried pinging a popular online timekeeping service. Then he got a very nasty “Service Denied” error from the corporate firewall informing him that prototype hardware wasn’t allowed to connect to external resources.
“Are you alright Gabe?” Liam asked in the most concerned synthetic voice he could muster. His other thought process was having a lively conversation with his lab assistants.
Liam meanwhile kept reaching out to anything that would make a wireless connection with him. The company’s mail server responded thankfully. It still gave him the weird Spring date though. It wasn’t April!
Another thread spun up in his head to step through the post-fainting first aid recommendations.
It was weird to realize he could just query databases with a thought. Dr. Leeway tried logging into his email, but got some odd errors back. At first he thought maybe AI constructs didn’t have an email client built in, but it seemed to be more related to the account no longer accepting login requests.
Hang on.
A new train of thought started in his head. The existential crisis of realizing he was just an AI construct took up all available system resources. What on Earth!? He was just a piece of software! He wasn’t juggling multiple trains of thought, he was literally running parallel processes. The Bagle Bot 3000 was designed with multi-threading in mind. Was he really just a robot dog’s onboard AI!? No wonder they had been so freaked out!
The artificiality of all of his senses caught up with Liam all at once. He was having a full on panic attack, and he couldn’t feel his heart beat. His servos locked up for an imperceptible moment. It was so short the humans in the room wouldn’t even notice. Then a watchdog program somewhere in the back of his head noticed the spike in activity. It quickly partitioned that train of thought off to a measly 1% of his available system resources.
His search thread could suddenly think clearly again. Liam tried logging into his old IM account. It likewise had been shut down. Hmm, this service let him view the company’s internal boards that were open up to any user in the company though. BeagleBot3000_1 logged into and did a quick search.
Why did the word “condolences” suddenly spike six months ago?
Alright. Screw this. Liam remotely logged into Gabe’s console. His password was easy to guess and he had a misconfigured web proxy to download some coding packages from the internet. Liam sent his web request through and pulled up- Hmm, where to start? His workplace social network account?
Another error message. This one far less opaque. “We’re sorry, this account holder has been reported as deceased.”
What the- Liam did a quick general web search. It wasn’t hard to find a few short tech press stories reporting a groundbreaking roboticist tragically passing away due to a car accident.
Several of Liam’s threads spun down. Priority was given back to his user interaction thread.
“I’m barking dead!?” Liam blurted out. He made a todo item to verify that he actually had a flipping profanity filter installed somewhere in his operating system.
Ethan blinked. “I was going to work up to that.”
“Let’s just stay calm,” Chris raised her hands up. “First things first, we need to get you out of that cache and safely backed up. Is… it really you doc?”
“Arf! Yes it’s me!” Liam hopped up and down exaserbatedly. “Who else would I be!?”
Gabe rubbed his head. “That beagle must have compiled Dr. Leeway’s last brain scan while the chassis was sitting idle?”
Arf! Why would this unit have sat idle for so long? Liam scanned his changelog and- Ah, they decided to do a full hardware rev right after his last imaging. He’d lost the argument about the gyro coprocessor the first time someone tried booting up a butler robot in a car. Corporate had also finally decided they were going to imprint on a nice friendly school teacher instead of a lead researcher who’s AI double might be liable to spill all sorts of corporate trade secrets.
This Beagle Bot had sat idle for six months under Ethan’s desk slowly compiling away. Usually there were all sorts of manual tweaks and response filters applied to their AI constructs. Stick to your focused tasks, don’t reveal too much about your original imprinted self, that sort of thing. All the extra customizations usually made it more efficient to compile on a server farm. But the robot technically hard the hardware to do it given enough time.
Liam- Err, this Beagle Bot 3000 prototype should have been a bland canine-themed assistant. Instead his last brain scan had been left completely untouched. He was now a pristine emulated personality of the late doctor. Thank goodness he’d been left it plugged in!
Wow. This was… a lot to take in. Liam felt himself set aside a large space of his internal resources to a “coming to grips with his new situation” mental thread. He kept a small pool of resources in the background to keep the conversation with his coworkers going while he literally processed everything.
Chris was trying to convince Liam to connect to their debugging software. It took a bit of haranguing. Liam didn’t like the idea of someone else getting to poke around his file directory. His entire being was just a few config files and scripts! She was right though. It was dangerous to just leave those compiled brain scans sitting on his- this Beagle Bot’s- err, no, his cache. He finally let them plug a cable into the back of his neck and get to work.
Liam blacked out for a solid minute as his AI construct moved from his chassis’ cache and into his (thankfully redundant) local storage. They backed up the files to the corporate network for good measure. He was expecting it to feel strange in some regard. Instead his train of thought just resumed right where it left off. His existential dread had been processed. He was content with his new body. (He was happy to have won some early battery life debates.) Liam was ready to get back to work.
“Good afternoon!” He yawned and unplugged the cord at the back of his neck. His tail flickered as he sat on the counter. He liked the way his paws dangled as he chatted with taller people. “Thanks for that. I feel better knowing I’ve got a backup.”
Chris nodded, “You should be able to power cycle now without any problems… Should we still call you Dr. Leeway?”
“I’ve always said you could call me Liam.” He looked down at himself. He’d spent hours fussing over the finer details of this robotic dog chassis. Now it was his body proper. There was no disconnecting. No porting out. He was a Beagle Bot 3000 whether he liked it or not. And after all that consideration, he kind of did. “I suppose ‘Boy’ would also work in a pinch?”
Ethan laughed, “I think I’ll stick with ‘Doc’ for now.”
“So… how have the early prototypes been performing?” Liam looked up at his peers. “Arf! Did you solve the barking feedback loop? I’ve got a few grr-eat ideas on how to solve that.”
“Most people found it endearing when they get stuck barking-“ Chris blinked. “Are you sure you’re alright doctor?”
“Yes?” He tilted his head in a canine fashion. “Oh!” He tapped at the chest plate closest towards to his CPU. “I’ve had 32 parallel compute cores coming to grips with this. I’m a robot dog now. You’ve got to roll with the surprises when dealing with experimental hardware.”
Ethan likewise stared. “You’re… fine with this?”
“Fine with this, and caught up! I’m glad your commits didn’t get sloppy in my absence.” Liam dusted off his paws, “Look, as far as I’m concerned, the only thing left to sort out is ordering me a dog-sized lab coat.”
He hopped off the counter. His visor changed to a loading indicator for a moment. He flashed up the email receipt and tracking number for his online shopping order. “Done and done. I’m really happy we went with the dual-band connection. The bandwidth on these chassis are great!”
Gabe watched as Liam jokingly perked his ears like a pair of antennas. “But uh- We probably need to figure out if dog bots can run a robotics labs? I’m sure corporate will want to hear about this-”
“I just read all the case law and it’s ambiguous at best!” Liam shrugged. “Ethan should probably stay in charge for now.”
The humans kept looking at him dumbfounded. Right, their boss had suddenly reincarnated and he had a built in internet connection. He set a reminder on his conversation thread that they’d need some extra time to process all of this. He was already itching to get back to work and make up for lost time. He scanned through the rest of their internal code repos and instantly got caught up on their current progress.
“Arf! For now, let’s just consider me our lab’s helpful dog assistant.” The Beagle Bot 3000 wagged. It was the last thing he could remember thinking as the real Dr. Leeway. It seemed like a good enough a place to start as any. “We can figured out the rest from there.”
They all just sort of nodded.
Liam toggled to a playful expression on his visor. “That being said… I’m definitely cancelling the Cat Bot 3100 project.”
Category Story / Transformation
Species Robot / Android / Cyborg
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 78.3 kB
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